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MASON, Texas (AP) — On a YouTube clip that has gone viral, brash Texas handgun instructor Crockett Keller defiantly tells Muslims and non-Christian Arabs he won’t teach them how to handle a firearm.

State officials see the ad as possible discrimination, and may revoke Keller’s instructor license.

Tens of thousands of YouTube viewers have watched the $175 ad for Keller’s business in the small community of Mason, which has won him a handful of admirers but that embarrassed locals say misrepresents their community. Muslim groups dismissed the 65-year-old as a bigot.

Among the couple of thousand residents in the Central Texas town, Keller has other reputations.

“He’s a character and likes attention,” said Diane Eames, a jeweler with a downtown shop in Mason’s quaint town square.

Keller has received plenty of attention since his radio spot on a rural country music station in Mason County, about 100 miles east of Austin, went viral on the Internet. Keller said he whipped up the script on his iPad in 10 minutes. The ad quit airing last week.

“If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner-in-chief, please do not take this class,” Keller says in the ad’s closing seconds, also taking a swipe at President Barack Obama. “You’ve already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law. Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you this class. Once again, with no shame, I am Crockett Keller.”

The Texas Council on American-Islamic Relations called the ad ugly rhetoric undeserving of media attention. Others have called Keller’s phone number from the ad to personally tell him worse, including alleged death threats.

The Texas Department of Public Safety is now investigating whether to revoke or suspend Keller’s license to teach concealed handgun courses.

“Conduct by an instructor that denied service to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion would place that instructor’s certification by the Department at risk of suspension or revocation,” the department said in a statement.

Inside a remote highway cabin on the edge of the Llano River, where a draped, full-size cannon is parked across from his desk, Keller said he was inspired to make the ad after being “flabbergasted” by a couple neighbors who left the state to campaign for Obama. As for refusing to teach Muslims, Keller described that as an afterthought tacked onto the spot, which he couldn’t remember but said was likely generated from something in the news.

“I got to thinking, ‘Hmm, I’m arming the enemy,’” Keller said.

Of course, even Keller knows that Muslims were unlikely to show up at his door asking to take his $100 course.

Mason County, as Eames described it, is “white bread” — the population was 93 percent Caucasian in the latest census, and all Republican statewide candidates won with at least 70 percent of the vote in 2010. Keller said he wasn’t aware of any Muslims in Mason County, nor could a handful of locals name one.

Eames and Joyce Arnold, a real estate agent, said they worried about the radio spot embarrassing the city. Eames ran what she described as a successful sex-toy business in Mason before opening the jewelry store, and Scott Haupert, co-owner of the Sandstone Cellars Winery, said Mason is more tolerant than Keller’s comments would suggest.

“I voted for Obama and I’ll vote for Obama again,” said Haupert, an avowed Democrat. “If I signed up to take his gun control class, he would not reject me.”

But Keller has also won over some fans. As he spoke with a reporter in his cabin, rancher Clyde McCarley knocked on his door and asked about signing up for a class.

“It’s mighty dadgum interesting to me that some people can say anything they want, and you make a statement and they bring down the house on you,” McCarley said.

Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Texas Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group is watching how the state responds to Keller’s ad and whether the agency revokes his instructor license.

“We try not to give too much credibility to some of these people who do outlandish things,” Carroll said. “But there are some issues that we do have to address.”

Barack Obama ‘Acting Stupidly’

Jeannie
DeAngelis

Without saying anything, Barack Obama’s silence speaks
louder than all his empty words. The President who likes to define himself as a
champion of racial equality and promoter of civility has thus far stood by in
silence as liberals attempt to lower the stature of Herman Cain by portraying
him as a conservative version of Stepin Fetchit.

By failing to address the prejudicial remarks directed
at Herman Cain, the President of the United States is revealing a side of
himself that reeks of a form of discriminatory selectiveness that should further
discredit his claim to be the purveyor of civility and racial
justice.

Who can forget the President’s response to the
supposed prejudice leveled against Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates?
Without the benefit of all the information surrounding the incident, Barack
Obama rushed before the cameras to publicly condemn Cambridge, Massachusetts
police officer Joseph Crowley and insinuated that, due to the color of his skin,
Gates was the target of racial profiling and victimized by ‘stupidity’ on the
part of law enforcement.

Recently the President spoke at the dedication of the
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. It was there that he
described Dr.
King as “a black preacher with no official rank or title who somehow gave voice
to our deepest dreams and our most lasting ideals, a man who stirred our
conscience and thereby helped make our union more perfect.”

Yet, while Herman Cain, a man who fits a similar
description, is whacked by MSNBC analyst Karen Finney with a verbal billy club
and drenched with a fire hose of mean-spirited rhetoric that described him as
merely a “Black man who knows his place” – Barack Obama has remained
silent.

Where is the President’s usual predictable
indignation? Why no public correction or call for mutual
respect?

At the Martin Luther King Memorial dedication, in an
attempt to portray himself as a great black leader, Obama didn’t hesitate to put
a self-referential spin on the narrative of Dr. King’s life, saying:
“Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr.
King was vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a
communist and a radical.”

Barack Obama had the temerity to place himself on the
same level as Martin Luther King Jr. and yet, soon after, he stood by while
left-wing pundits with zero content of character made racially humiliating
comments about Herman Cain that were based solely on the color of his
skin.

Thus far, Obama hasn’t said a word. He has neither
corrected, condemned, nor cited mentor Saul Alinsky, whom he
quoted at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial dedication
when he said, “We can’t be discouraged by what is. We’ve got to keep pushing for
what ought to be.”

Maybe the President also believes that if a black
American such as Herman Cain is a conservative, he should know his place and
that, especially in politics, they are nothing more than a stereotype, a
caricature.

When not diminishing the memory of Dr. King by
pretending to be much like him, Barack spends some of his off time making the
rounds collecting campaign contributions in Hollywood. In the meantime, liberal
comedian David Letterman is on a mission to replace GW Bush withHerman Cain as
the newest late-night-created Republican stammering idiot.

If any of the Letterman “Top
Ten Signs Herman Cain’s Campaign is in Trouble” were
applied to Barack Obama, the left would be picketing the Ed Sullivan Theatre and
demanding an Imus-style resignation. If the butt of Dave’s jokes had been named
Henry (as in Professor Henry Gates), Obama would never have stood for Letterman
implying that Henry was “less fun-crazy and more crazy-crazy.”

It doesn’t end there either. In the name of fairness
and economic equity the President, who insulted Tea Party activists by referring
to them as
racists and by using the vulgar sexual slang term
“tea
baggers” to describe American citizens, has yet to condemn
the behavior taking place within the ‘Occupy’ movement.

So far, Obama has not disassociated himself from a
protest infiltrated by prostitution,
public masturbation,
filth, violence,
and people fighting over money, blankets and food, nor has he called for
civility from a nationwide movement presently populated by ingrates that scream
police brutality after defecating on the bumpers of squad
cars.

Which brings us back to Obama’s disingenuous attempt
to convince people that he possesses a measure of righteousness that sets him
apart from mere mortals.

When it benefited him politically and he wanted to
paint the right as impolite, he hosted a civility conference in Tucson Arizona,
quoted Scripture, and called for a measure of tolerance he demands for himself
but is unwilling to extend to anyone else.

If Hollywood liberals promise to put cash in Obama’s
2012 campaign coffers, he casually overlooks demeaning comments directed toward
Herman Cain by asinine comedians because what would otherwise be viewed as
racially-tinged humor may instead help advance his cause.

If a group of deadbeat derelicts squat in public parks
and proceed to behave like savages, if the signs they carry support “sharing the
wealth” and condemn the wealthy, and in time for the next election hold the
promise of swaying the general public toward liberal policies, then by saying
nothing the President, America’s self-proclaimed purveyor of non-discrimination
and equal rights, is condoning rape, racism,
and barefaced anti-Semitism.

By exhibiting selective indignation and failing to
address the negative racial remarks directed at potential presidential
opponents, supporting the nationwide disgrace that is the ‘Occupy’ movement, and
choosing to associate with liberal comedians who make Herman Cain the butt of
racial jokes, President Barack Obama is proving he doesn’t understand the
responsibilities of his role, or understand his place as a
leader.

Obama Chooses American Defeat

James G.
Wiles

In April, 2007, at the height of
American casualties during the Surge in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D. Nev.) famously announced
“the war is lost.” His remark attracted national headlines – and a big push-back
from Republicans, who, in the wake of the 2006 elections, controlled neither
House of Congress.

An American President – George W.
Bush of Texas – had refused to accept defeat. He changed his military leaders,
launched the Surge and victory followed. And, even though, the Republicans had
lost control of Congress, President Bush’s control of the Executive branch and
the American people’s refusal to accept defeat prevailed over leading Democrats’
desire for American defeat.. It enabled the forces of the Sunni Awakening,
General Petraeus and the coalition’s troops to crush the Iraq
insurgency.

Over a thousand American soldiers died in
Iraq after Leader Reid’s remarkable press conference.

Democrats, like Reid, who’d predicted
defeat, never changed their views. Now, President Barack Obama has just
guaranteed that Senator Reid’s remark will come true. Iraq is not Vietnam and
the Middle East is not Southeast Asia. Yet, the parallels – 36 years after a
Democratic Congress cut off U.S. funding for South Vietnam – are
unsettling.

Once again, a leader of the
Democratic Party has opted for American defeat – after a splendid American field
army has achieved military victory. Former New York Times Baghdad
bureau chief John Burns predicted disaster as a result of Mr. Obama’s decision
on Hugh
Hewitton October 24. “We’ll see” was the most optimism Pulitzer-Prize
winner Dexter
Filkins could muster on his New Yorker blog.

These guys aren’t
conservatives. But, with Michael Yon, these famous war correspondents are
not hopeful about whether America’s sacrifice in Iraq will be
redeemed..

How can Democrats ever be trusted
with America’s national security again?

It’s a simple as
that.

Read Fred and Kimberly Kagan’s
excellent piece this weekend in the new issue of the Weekly
Standard for the post-mortem. The Kagans were part of the intellectual
brain trust behind the Surge – the Surge which President Obama has just thrown
away.

Obama takes risky stance against the rich

With the US economy suffering through its deepest slump since the Great Depression, the Obama administration has designed a political strategy to match, with echoes of the campaign rhetoric deployed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Throwing out the standard presidential playbook dictating an aspirational pitch to centrist voters, the White House is cementing a high-risk message that strikes firmly at wealth and privilege.

“There is surging sentiment out there among voters that the economy is weighted towards the wealthy,” said a senior White House official. “Public opinion has changed dramatically.”

The White House strategy will make the 2012 election a generational test of the Republican push of the past three decades for cutting taxes, in ways their critics say have been constantly skewed towards the highest earners.

The after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 per cent of US households increased by 275 per cent over the past three decades, compared to an average of 62 per cent for all Americans, the independent Congressional Budget Office reported this week. For the poorest 20 per cent, the growth was only 18 per cent.

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests that are spreading raggedly across the US and the world have thrown a spotlight on mounting popular anger at economic stagnation and income inequality.

But the factors driving the White House go further, to their inability to strike any substantive deals on their terms with congressional Republicans emboldened by their smashing victory in last November’s mid-term elections.

The failure of the economic recovery to yield many jobs during its mild upswing of the past two years has also transformed the political calculus for a president facing a perilous re-election battle.

“In normal circumstances, this pitch might be suicidal. But these are not normal circumstances,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institute.

Mr Galston has been reading the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt’s winning campaign for the 1936 presidential election and finds striking comparisons to the emerging line from Mr Obama.

All sides of politics have been regrouping since the fraught negotiations in August over the country’s borrowing limits that bought the US to the edge of sovereign default.

While Mr Obama was widely depicted as weak in his dealings with Congress, the clash damaged the Republican majority in the House of Representatives even more. Congressional approval ratings are now in single digits.

Although they have offered little fresh on policy, Republicans are tweaking their public message, with the hardline house majority leader, Eric Cantor, recently acknowledging the need to address the rich-poor gap.

Mitt Romney, the frontrunner in the Republican race to challenge Barack Obama in 2012, has taken to saying that he is standing up for the “middle class” because the rich “can look after themselves”.

For the White House, this is just the terrain that it wants to fight on. “The Republicans want to give the average millionaire a $200,000 tax cut, while the middle class is struggling,” said the White House official.

The majority of Republican voters polled by the White House agree with the president, the official added, meaning “they hold a different opinion from their lawmakers and their candidates”.

Mr Obama has been barnstorming the country for the past month, highlighting a jobs package which his aides acknowledge little of which has any chance of passing.

The aim is put Mr Obama back at the centre of the debate after a period in which he seemed marginalised and ineffective, the worst position a sitting president can be in.

“Let’s re-emphasise what powers we have! What we can do on our own! Push the envelope!” William Daley, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Politico, the Washington publication.

“What the president wants to turn this into is the proposition that you may hate us, but you will hate these people more,” said a senior Republican congressional official. “We need to make sure we do not allow him to turn this election into an anti-incumbent election.”

Besides the inherent risk in making wealth the central issue in a country which has prided itself on the ability of anyone to get rich, Mr Obama must also surmount a credibility gap in taking on Wall Street.

“He has blown hot and cold on the finance sector, so he is widely regarded as having fallen between two stools,” said Mr Galston.

In the White House, there is no doubt that it is entering the election year with its back against the wall.

Who is Barack Obama?

There are so many things the public does not know
about the man who sits in the White House. Who is Barack Obama? In my search
to find out the answers I embarked on a journey that has lasted three years and
counting — and nearly made my head explode.

As usual, when Obama is the subject, Americans can’t
count on the progressives in the Corporate Mainstream Media (CMM) for much
help. So, what’s one to do? The foreign press proved helpful. Therefore,
gleaned from the foreign press: a few stories which didn’t rate any coverage
from the U.S. CMM.

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama went on a mission
to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). The newly-minted U.S. senator was
invited to be part of a Russian fact-finding tour that inspected a nuclear
weapons site in Perm, Siberia. The base Lugar and Obama visited was where
mobile launch missiles were being destroyed under the Cooperative Threat
Reduction program (CTR), which also went by the name of the Nunn-Lugar
program.

What happened next — after the inspections were over
— was at the time reported by several foreign news sources but was never
reported in the USA by the CMM. The Russians detained Obama and Lugar for three
hours at the airport, demanding to examine both Obama’s and Lugar’s passports
and search their plane. Some sources reported that the Russians accused Barack
Obama of being a spy.

But wait — there’s more!

According to an Italian source, the Russians did not
accuse Obama of being an American spy; they accused him of being a spy for the
British! The report went on to say that the incident ended up involving the
White House, the U.S. State Department, and military officials, along with their
counterparts in Moscow.

Strangely enough, an official report from Lugar’s
office about the trip never mentioned the incident. Neither did Barack Obama in
2008 when he was desperate to exhibit some foreign policy
chops.

One other oddity: in the fall of 2008, Obama admitted
on his Fightthesmears.com site that he had held dual citizenship with both the
United States and Great Britain (the site explained that this was due to Barack
Obama, Sr. being a foreign national) until 1982. Did the Russians know
something about Obama’s citizenship in 2005 that ordinary Americans don’t know
in 2011?

Another story no one has seen fit to ask about:
Obama’s Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure.

In the summer of 1981, 20-year-old Barack Obama
embarked on a two-week trip to Pakistan. At least what little reporting that
has been done claimed the length of the trip was two weeks. The only proof that
the trip didn’t turn into a longer stay is that we (supposedly) have records
which show that Barack Obama enrolled at Columbia University later that same
summer. Of course, the public hasn’t seen those records, but that’s what we’ve
been told. Anyone in doubt will be directed to Obama’s autobiography,Dreams from My Father.

Obama clearly gave the impression in DFMF that he was
this penniless, somewhat confused young man, in search of an identity. Obama
makes sure readers don’t miss the point by writing that he was forced to wear
“thrift store clothing” during this time. Yet he somehow managed to find the
cash to finance a two-week trip to Pakistan.

Which he never wrote about. Which in itself is odd:
here’s a guy who wrote two autobiographies that explored events real, imagined,
and totally fictional that supposedly forged the modern-day Barack Obama from
humble beginnings. That’s according to the Obama NarrativeTM —
which gets most of its facts from Dreams from My
Father.

Not only did a poor, nearly destitute Obama manage to
afford the trip to Pakistan, but once there he somehow financed two weeks in the
Lahore Hilton International. In addition, Obama was introduced to the future
prime minister and president of Pakistan — and went bird-hunting with him.
Which the prime minister mentioned in the Pakistani press in 2008. There’s so
much more, including one question the CMM never asked Obama: who arranged all of
this? For a 20-year-old nobody.

Another curious piece to the queer Obama puzzle is the
connection — which hasn’t been made in the CMM (attention, Fox News!) —
between illegal foreign contributions to the Obama campaign and subsequent
billions in Stimulus money to foreign companies and banks. During and after the
2008 election, accusations of illegal foreign contributions — which flowed into
the Obama campaign when credit card safeguards were disabled on the campaign’s
website — were documented in the conservative press and
elsewhere.

Who were these mysterious donors, and in what
countries did they live? Unfortunately, due to the chicanery of Team Obama, we
may never know. Fast-forward to 2009. Obama’s multi-billion-dollar Stimulus is
rushed through Congress, and billions of dollars in Stimulus money are doled out
to foreign companies and banks. Finland, China, Brazil, and India are just a
few of the beneficiaries of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. Might these have
been payoffs for those shady, unknown donations?

Bill Clinton was the first president to benefit from a
foreign spoils system, but Barack Obama has made Clinton look like an
amateur.

One more coincidence in shady fundraising. The lady
involved with Obama’s fundraising in the Caribbean? None other than Vera Baker,
who packed up and hurried left the country after the National Enquirer
started exploring a possible tryst between her and Obama in a Washington
hotel.

Barack Obama can only hope that ObamaCare covers
“extreme stress” — because whoever on his staff is responsible for keeping
track of all of the weird stuff in the president’s life is definitely a
candidate for burnout.

One final item involves that most elusive of
documents: Obama’s long-lost long-form birth certificate.

A Chicago-area activist, Sherman Skolnick, writing for
a radio show/website (now defunct) by the name of Cloak and Dagger uncorked this
headline on his readers. It referred to another story he’d written in 2005 —
three years before anyone in the media coined the term “birther” to tamp down
curiosity about our 44th president’s past. (All-caps headline in the
original story.)